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If you’re coming out of a bar near a subway station on the upper westside of Manhattan at 1:30, and you’re hungry, Duncan McCall has a suggestion for you -- maybe two or three suggestions -- for nearby eating spots that cater to a late-night crowd.

Well, not Duncan personally, but his company, PlaceIQ, which has handily cut the country into 100 x 100 meter tiles -- about the size of a small city block -- to track mobile phone users. If it finds you have opted into the service, it is ready to send you an ad or an offer from a neighborhood late-night eating spot.

“We have taken in tens of billions of data points about location and look at them in a grid system,” said Duncan, who co-founded PlaceIQ three years ago and is its CEO. “We analyze large amounts of location data. There is so much information created about and by location as people are standing in one spot on their phone tweeting, playing a game or looking for something.” From their behaviors and geo-coding, PlaceIQ can tell if they are at the beach or at a ski run and see the types of coupons they are redeeming.

The company’s largest market is advertising, and a case study with Meguiar, a car care products company that’s a subsidiary of . Its agency, FRWD, engaged PlaceIQ and Medialets for a mobile advertising campaign that it monitored for results.

The PlaceIQ Web site account says: “The rich media iPhone ad unit initiated a banner that prompted users to “tap” to learn more about a special offer and find a store. When tapped, the banner expanded to reveal a dirty car that a user could ‘clean’ by wiping the screen with their finger. The ad unit emulated the experience of using Meguiar’s Car Wax in a fun and interactive way and helped drive users to retail.”

This being 3M, a company of engineers, you wouldn’t be wrong to expect some controlled experiments, so they ran the campaign against controls in markets without the mobile advertising. The campaign reported a 118 percent sales lift, a 109 percent lift in response rates for location-enhanced data and a 150 percent lift in response rates compared to banner ads.

PlaceIQ also came up with some fascinating details. In Houston, college students and young adults were the most engaged audience while in Orlando it was families and seniors. The app could target a user, deliver a message suited to the audience and follow through their purchases

The optimism about location-aware apps was echoed by Jeff Jonas, Fellow and chief scientist in the company’s entity analytics group, when I talked to him for another story on using analytics for fraud prevention (coming soon).

“Geo spatial data is going to prove extremely powerful,” he said, “having some awareness of where you will be when.” He is thinking about both fraud reduction and marketing.

“We will see consumers opt in, and ads won’t feel so generic any more. People will look forward to an ad because it will be a good one for them.”

McCall said that privacy, once a major concern in targeting mobile users, has become less of an issue.

“People care less now than they did nine months ago.” Worries that the government will track people by their phones has receded, at least this side of Michele Bachmann.

“The government doesn’t break down people’s doors; nobody has died because of mobile,” he said, referring to mobile advertising, not traffic accidents caused by drivers texting at 60 miles per hour.

“Privacy is still a sensitive topic but less of an issue. Mobile is a really powerful medium because you have your phone with you all the time.”

Advertisers are treating mobile differently and learning how to use big data, he added. PlaceIQ recently announced a partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) to launch the Place Visit Rate, a way to monitor the ratio of people who view mobile advertising for a physical retailers and are later observed in a bricks and mortar store.

Now PlaceIQ is studying where people go and what it can learn from the locations they visit. One challenge ahead is for ad agencies to learn how mobile location-based messaging works best.

Agencies have a steep learning curve ahead, McCall added.

“There is a lot of education to be done. We are in a big transitional space, especially for agencies with social and mobile who have to decide how to build across platform strategies, how to build a campaign that is meaningful and respectful.”

McCall said PlaceIQ has been lucky to partner with an amazing agency and a strong client.

The problems will arise, he added, when an agency has access to location and personal information and then just serves up a flashing logo.

“It’s one thing to have all the tools and techniques at your disposal and another thing to deploy them. Everyone underestimates how hard that is to do well.”